As far as I'm concerned, Vice President Al Gore and Global Warming are completely discredited. However, many folks haven't come to this conclusion yet, so here goes. First, this doozey from Mr. Gore:

"In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." -- Al Gore (emphasis added - THC)

"Over representation of factual presentations" = LIES. He lies. They lie. The Greens/Chicken Littles freely admit they lie for the express purpose of generating the "appropriate" hysteria to get their crap enacted. Don't take my word for it that they're telling lies, take theirs.

Off we go to England, where they have lots of funny laws about speech. In order to show Mr. Gore's file, An Inconvenient Truth, in schools, the courts of England ruled as follows:

Here's something American media are virtually guaranteed to not report: a British court has determined that Al Gore's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" contains at least eleven material falsehoods.

...According to the website of the political party the plaintiff, Stewart Dimmock, belongs to (ecstatic emphasis added throughout, h/t Marc Morano):Advertisement

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

How marvelous. And what are those inaccuracies?

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.

* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.

* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

* The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

* The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

And then my economic spidey senses started tingling. For fresh in my memory was when I was stood up, not once, not twice, but thrice by a drop dead, Playboy-esque girl who had went to school for cosmotology. This observation, combined with my utter disdain for fluffy majors got me thinking;

Was there a correlation???

Do Playboy Playmates pursue easy degrees?

Funny enough to recommend you read the whole thing. Plus, it ends with two important yet contradictory moral lessons.

Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, a distinguished educational expert, notes that the budget for public schools in New York City is over $17 billion. That’s about $15,000 per pupil. Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of New York is closing 14 Catholic schools because it cannot support them on a tuition of $3,000 per year. Nobody disputes that the Catholic schools provide, by every measure of achievement, a much superior education.

Let's get out our spreadsheets and have some fun.

Suppose there was a 100% voucher system and I wanted to start my own private scool, grades K - 8, 20 pupils per class, 2 classes per grade. Let's go crazy with really high pay for teachers, nice office rent rate, reasonable administration, computers for everybody, expensive extracirricular activities, busing (a Wild Ass Guess, I admit), and $5.00 lunches (way, way, way more than they spend at my kids' school!). Then let's throw on an extra 10% just to make sure we haven't left anything out.

Revenue:

Gross $ per pupil

# pupils/class

# classes

Total Rev

15,000

20

18

5,400,000

Expenses

Teacher salary

18

70,000

1,260,000

Teacher benefts

18

10,000

180,000

Computers

383

250

95,750

Rent

18,000

20

360,000

Admin salary

5

50,000

250,000

Admin benefits

5

10,000

50,000

Admin rent

1,000

20

20,000

Student ext'r fees

360

874

314,730

Busing

360

779

280,584

Lunch

70,146

5

350,730

Internet & software

360

100

36,000

Supplies

18

2,000

36,000

Misc - 10%

3,233,794

0

323,379

Total expenses

3,557,173

PROFIT FOR ME!

1,842,827

I'm rich!

I cannot wait for the Republicans to take over and break the monopoly of the NEA. No, wait....

School technology facilitator Janet Erbe knows a lot about computers. So do more than 1800 students at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids. They also know one certain computer blog site is off limits. Erbe says, "it's frightening. It's frightening. That's why it is filtered here at school."

Erbe is talking about Xanga.com. An online diary blog site popular amongst Eastern Iowa teens. Erbe says, "kids use it to vent. And sometimes they say good things, sometimes they say inappropriate things."

Well, first of all, we're talking about the school's computers, not the students' home computers. They belong to the school, and the school is and should be free to regulate their property in anyway they see fit. The beef should be, if there needs to be a beef, that the public school is the only game in town. The parents should at least (moderate) have a choice of schools, schools that may or may not have restrictions on student internet sites. Or, better yet (Libertarian) the government should just get the hell out of education altogether and let private people do the job.

This guy, one of my heroes, makes so much sense with so few words it's scary. Sad that his words are not listened to more closely in Washington, and elsewhere.

Q: If the federal government does move to private accounts, does the $3 trillion that President Bush says he would have to borrow to get that moving cause a greater stress on the American economy?

A: No, because we already have that obligation. What we are talking about is replacing an unfunded debt with funded debt. We already have an obligation to all the people like myself who are currently on Social Security. The difference is it is not written out as funded debt. So when you talk about borrowing, they are not really changing the total government debt, they are only changing how much they recognize, and what is open and above board and how much of it is hidden in other funding. ...

Q: Since most of the immigrants to the United States are Mexican, what kind of effect is that having on the Mexican economy?

A: At the moment the Mexican economy is benefiting from the salaries that the Mexican immigrants are sending back home. The Mexican economy is, of course, losing its labor force, but the Mexican economy has not done a good job at creating jobs or job opportunities that these people would be suitable for. The real problem in Mexico is its policy as reflected in the whole economy. There is too much monopoly, too much regulation, too much restriction. All of that needs to be changed to get the Mexican economy growing at a rapid pace....

Q: Should the U.S. federal government look toward moving away from an income tax-based system to a consumption-based tax system?

A: That would be a very good idea. The disadvantage to taxing income is that it establishes a disincentive for savings, because income that is saved is going to be taxed twice. It is taxed initially when you earn it and save it, and again when (that savings) earns income, because that income is taxed again. With a consumption tax, you would tax it only once, when it is spent, not when it is saved.

Q: Do you believe like some people argue that that would put an unnecessary burden on the poor?

A: Who benefits from the saving? What's really helped the poor over the long period is having a productive economy with a larger amount of capital producing goods and services. The consumption tax, in so far as the people who receive an income don't spend it, in so far as they devote it to investment and savings, they are not eliminating what the poor have. On the contrary, they are building a platform that creates income for everybody....

Q: Do you think that as the U.S. moves to a service-based economy from a manufacturing based-economy that the country will continue to create the same type of high-paying jobs that the manufacturing sector did?

A: Absolutely. They have. Just look at the salaries that are being paid in Silicon Valley.

Let's go back to the basics. What is the real problem so far as the poor is concerned? In my opinion it is the lousy school systems we have, a school system in which something like a third drop out before they finish high school. And why do we have such a poor educational system? Because it is a government monopoly that, with the exception of some private schools, is run by the government, and like everything run by the government, it produces a product that is expensive and of a low quality. So if you want to do something about the poor, the most respective thing you could do would be to privatize the school system and allow parents to have a choice as to where their children would go to school.

Q: Nearly 50 years ago you were the first proponent of school vouchers. Why do you feel vouchers would help?,

A: Where in the country can you find a great advancement that has been produced by a government monopoly? All the great advancements we've had in automobiles, in telephones, the radio, you name it, all of those advancements have come about through private enterprise. Through competition in an attempt to make money from a better and cheaper product. But that has not been allowed to operate in the case of schooling. The government has monopolized the production of schooling. It's through parental choice that you will provide more competition. Then you will produce the kind of increase in quality that only private enterprise and competition is capable of doing.

The competition to get into the magnet schools of the Los Angeles school district has gotten so strong that parents are now forced to apply expecting not to get in, but hoping to pile up enough rejection points so that when their child is in middle school they will have enough points to get into the desired school.

Because of high demand, the district selects students by computer, using a complicated points system that awards more points to students whose neighborhood schools are overcrowded or located in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Under stringent racial guidelines, each magnet school should be 60% to 70% minority and 30% to 40% white.

But that system has created a number of quirky side effects. Because the district doles out points to children who have been rejected in years past, many parents try to play a game with the system, applying to longshot schools in the hope of being rejected so they can acquire points for later use. And the parents of multiracial students are counseled by some administrators on how to identify their children based on the ethnic needs of a particular school.

Now, nearly three decades after the magnet program began, approximately 53,500 students attend magnet programs. That includes about 20% of the district's Asian students and 16% of whites. Only 4.6% of Hispanic students — the district's largest ethnic group — are enrolled in magnet schools.

In a district where more than 90% of students are minorities, some critics wonder whether the racial breakdowns used by the magnet program have outlived their purpose.

"It's kind of ironic," said Ryane Straus, a doctoral candidate at UC Irvine who is writing her dissertation on the use of magnet schools for desegregation in L.A. Unified. "We have this policy for desegregation, and now it benefits whites and Asians — more than blacks and Latinos — even though they are more likely to go to college anyway."

Isn't it about time to examine whether such a system is the best way to distribute children into schools? If these schools are so desirable, why not create more of them to satisfy the demand? If the reason is because they are too expensive then why are some children allowed to get this more expensive, desirable education and the great majority are not? No school system should be so complicated that parents are forced to try to game the system. I taught in a magnet school for many years and saw some similar shenanigans going on. Now, I teach in a charter school and parents regularly try to find some secret way to get their children into our school. There is nothing I can say to them. We have a pure lottery and the only guarantee is if you have a sibling at the school.

Having taught in both a public and a charter school and having sent my daughters to both types of school, I can honestly say that I wouldn't trade away the charter for the public school either as a parent or a teacher. There is absolutely no comparison.

The solution would be to establish more charter schools that would satisfy the demand. But our state in its finite wisdom has capped the number of charter schools it will allow. They make the entrance barriers to creating a charter so high that few but the most ambitious and dedicated dare to attempt it. The fact that we could fill our school twice over with students shows that there is indeed a demand for a quality, demanding high school. Lift the cap and someone will do their best to establish such a school in the area.

Betsy, don't hold your breath. The NEA, the Democrat Party, and School Bureaucracies are not motivated by providing charter schools for students.

Nothing really blog worthy about the event, except we hear so much about how nutty the public schools have become, and how Christmas has been expunged from "The Holidays." Well, I'm happy to report that at least one school in Florida, nice Christmas books with a mildly religious message are still on the menu.

Bravo. Special Double Bravo to Ozona's new Principal, Mrs. Kerry Apuzzo, for maintaining a tradition and standard of excellence.

I've been having so much fun volunteering I've started pondering becoming a teacher myself. Haven't figured out how to handle the cut in pay, but that's the only thing stopping me.

And the teacher said I could read a book to the kids all by myself next time. I do a very unique Rainbow Fish -- I call him Comrade Rainbow Fish and I do the whole book in outrageous Russian accent to bring across good Soviet moral of story. My version of first sentence:

Long vay out in deep blue sea lived fish. Not just ordinary fish, but most beautiful fish in entire ocean. Scales every shade of blue and green and purple, with sparkling silver scales among dem....

But that's another post. For this I just wanted to say "Well done" to the teachers and staff of Ozona Elementary School, Home of the Ospreys.

I love reading too. Hindrocket has graciously given us a list of his favorite "Guilty Pleasures" books. What I love about other people's favorites list is this -- if I like one, I'll probably like them all. It's an easy way to get a road map to expanding my mind.

Seen at low tide

HummingbirdFinally, my first hummingbirds. Saw them on a fire bush in Crystal Beach, FL. My rental's neighbor's yard is all xeriscaped, which is ugly to me but just fine with the little hummers. At first, I thought they were the biggest hornets I'd ever seen.

Flamingo!One of these dudes flew right over my house. I couldn't believe it. And please don't tell me it was a roseated spoonbill because it was a frickin' flamingo, dude! Huge and pink and right there above me. I was like so freaking out, you know?

Black SkimmerThese beauties are getting scarce, but one flew by yesterday at low tide on the hunt for minnows.

Dead sea turtlecool, but smelly

Reddish EgretThese have been hanging out around the pool quite a bit lately. Must be a new group of adolesent birds -- the youngsters like to hunt where the water is clear, and it takes them a day to figure out there are not now and never will be fish in the swimming pool no matter how clear the water.

Sand Piper

Brown PelicanI saw a flock of about 200 of these at Disappearing Island yesterday, just south of Anclote Island on the west coast of FL. Good to see such a large flock.

Wood PeckerThey've developed a sudden interest in the orange tree, which just went into bloom.